A couple weeks ago I came across a By Common Consent post that quoted this gem by Lorenzo Snow, taken from George Q. Cannon’s diary (via Leonard Arrington’s book Adventures of a Church Historian):
I saw Joseph Smith the Prophet do things which I did not approve of; and yet…I thanked God that He would put upon a man who had these imperfections the power and authority which He placed upon him…for I knew I myself had weakness and I thought there was a chance for me. These same weaknesses…I knew were in Heber C. Kimball, but my knowing this did not impair them in my estimation. I thanked God I saw these imperfections.
Knowing that our prophets are human and imperfect is really comforting to me. The Lord knows us better than we know ourselves and is very aware of our flaws, and yet miraculously, mercifully, he still sees our potential and gives us responsibilities and assignments that help us grow.
As for what our attitude towards these human prophets ought to be, Arrington’s book goes on to quote Brigham Young in the next paragraph:
Even Brigham Young, who loved Joseph Smith with a constancy that bordered on idolatry, admitted in a discourse on loving-kindness in the Salt Lake Bowery that he sometimes thought that the prophet was not always right in his management of affairs. “It gave me sorrow of heart [to see this],” he said, but “I clearly saw and understood, by the spirit of revelation manifested in me, that if I was to harbor a thought in my heart that Joseph could be wrong in anything, I would begin to lose confidence in him, and that feeling would grow…until at last I would have the same lack of confidence in his being the mouthpiece for the Almighty.” So Young decided to let the Lord deal with Joseph’s failings. “Though I admitted in my feelings and knew all the time that Joseph was a human being and subject to err, still it was none of my business to look after his faults…. He was called of God; God dictated [to] him, and if He had a mind to leave him to himself and let him commit an error, that was no business of mine…. Though he had his weaknesses,” Young continued, “he was all that any people could require a true prophet to be.”
Our Church leaders aren’t going to be perfect. They just aren’t. And that’s okay. Their imperfections don’t void the fact that it was God who called them and that they have real power and authority from the Almighty. God can use imperfect people to do his work. (And thank heavens for that.)
This next issue of Mormon Artist (#16, June/July 2011) will be our last.
It’s been a good three years — in our seventeen issues (including #16 and our contest issue), we’ll have featured over 130 Latter-day Saint artists. We published some important special issues (New York City, international, and science fiction and fantasy), and I hope we accomplished our goal of showing that there’s a lot more going on in the Latter-day Saint arts world than many of us realized.
Why it’s ending
While I’ve loved doing Mormon Artist, it’s time for me to move on to other projects.
And no, this isn’t because we ran out of content. The field is just as white as ever, and there are still scads of people to interview — more than we could ever hope to feature. Even though we’re laying Mormon Artist to rest, it’s my hope that others will join sites like Linescratchers and The Cricket and Seagull in filling the niche. (A few of my editors will be starting a new venture covering LDS arts, by the way. I’ll have more details on that when they’re ready to launch.)
Some of you may be wondering why I’m shutting the whole thing down instead of just getting someone else to run the magazine. Even if it were easy to find someone to helm a non-profit gig like this, I’d much rather see fresh approaches — new variations on the theme, if you will. The way we’ve done things with Mormon Artist isn’t the only way to cover the Mormon arts world.
What’s going to happen next
Sometime in June, we’ll publish Issue 16 (this time all our interviewees are female, by the way — mostly since in Issue 15 they were all male). And then the curtain will fall.
I’ll keep the website up for the foreseeable future, of course, and comments will stay open, but we won’t be creating any new content under the Mormon Artist banner.
I do want to say thanks to everyone who has been involved with Mormon Artist over the last three years — readers, volunteers, interviewees, all y’all. It’s been wonderful. The magazine has been a huge part of my life, not to mention its role in helping me meet my future wife, and I’ll always look back on these days with fondness. But there are exciting new things ahead, too. Onward ho.
People err who think my art comes easily to me. I assure you, dear friend, nobody has devoted so much time and thought to composition as I. There is not a famous master whose music I have not industriously studied through many times.
From Twyla Tharp’s excellent book The Creative Habit (p. 8), which I highly recommend along with Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art.
I ended up only writing twenty stories instead of thirty, but I’m okay with that — it’s twenty stories more than I would have written otherwise.
#15: “Blueprints” — (science fiction)
#16: “Watchtower” — (thriller)
#17: “Alastair’s Songbox” — (fantasy)
#18: “Doors” — (fantasy)
#19: “The Rose Garden” — (contemporary)
#20: “The Goose and the Golden Egg” — (fable-ish)
Having written these stories, I feel like I’ve gotten a better grasp on how to put a story together, how to write a short story (as opposed to a novel), and how my fiction-writing process works. (If I spent an hour a morning writing, I could have written 50–60 stories instead of just twenty.)
Mormon Artist Issue 15 is now available. We’ve got interviews with with Gerald Lund, Nnamdi Okonkwo, Brian Kershisnik, Arlen Card, David Glen Hatch, Jean-François Demeyère, and Marco Lui. Also featuring a mini-documentary on Blaine Gale. Enjoy:
This evening I came across this passage by Arthur Henry King in Arm the Children (page 123):
I believe that the more we know about our ancestors — the way they lived, the history of their times, their language and culture — the more chance we have that they will accept the gospel. I am sure that is so because if we turn our hearts towards them, they should turn their hearts toward us. That is one of the things that Malachi means.
